Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2925

Seven mimeographed sheets of biographical data about Heath prepared by Heath’s hostess in California, Mrs. Frances Norton Manning, 312 Halesworth Street, Santa Ana, with material provided in large part by Spencer MacCallum, as a “fact sheet” at the time of Heath’s death. This transcription was somewhat edited and added to by MacCallum in 2015, as will be seen from comparison with the original.

October 1963

 

 

 

 

 

FACT SHEET

SPENCER HEATH

BORN: January 3, 1876 DIED: October 6, 1963

PHONE Daughter

Mrs. Heath MacCallum

Waterford, Virginia

882-5796

 

 

                  “Roadsend Gardens” Legal residence :  1502 Montgomery Rd.

                   Baltimore 27, Maryland

[property bought in 1920 for $7,600, houses built about 1921 — a 15-room house, garage, and 5-room cottage]

Bank: United States Trust Company of New York. Trust Officer:

Mr. Elmo P. Brown, vice president. 45 Wall Street, New York.

Family:  Married Johanna Maria Holm in Grand Rapids, Michigan,

May 5, 1899. She died November, 1940, in Winchester, Virginia.

 

 

 

Surviving:

 

Three daughters of Spencer Heath

(No other offspring):

 

Marguerite  (Mrs. Merton C. McConkey)

  Lansing, Michigan

  1120 Washtenaw Street

Lucile      (Mrs. Heath MacCallum)

  Waterford, Virginia

Beatrice    (Mrs. Irvan O’Connell)

           Route 5, Winchester, Va.

 

Six grandchildren

Four grandsons and two granddaughters

Seven great-grandchildren

Five boys and two girls

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FACT SHEET

Page 1

Spencer Heath

SPENCER HEATH

BORN: Vienna, Virginia

January 3, 1876

 

 

Born on a farm in Virginia, Spencer Heath moved as a boy into Washington, D.C., where he was educated at the Corcoran Scientific School. He took his first job in the tool-making department of the Elgin Watch Company in Elgin, Illinois, making the finely adjusted machinery used in watch manufacture. From there he went into the experimental department of the Western Electric Company, Chicago, and did experimental work on telephone apparatus, especially succeeding in inventing a successful “lock­out box” to prevent cutting in on party lines. Reports from Iowa, however, where it was tested, were discouraging, and the device was discontinued. The country people didn’t want any lock­ing out; they wanted to know what was going on! Mr. Heath next designed hydraulic machinery for the Crane Company, radically re­designing their entire line of cast iron valves, principally globe, angle and gate valves. In 1902, he returned from Chicago and took a job with the Navy Department in Washington in order to study law there.

 

 He graduated from National University Law School, Washington, D.C., in 1906. As a student, he was president of the debating society, won a gold medal for highest scholarship and published a simplified table of Parliamentary Procedure which was used by the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives and commended in a letter by the then Chairman of the Committee, John J. Jenkins.

 

 Mr. Heath’s favorite sport at this time was sailing. He
designed and built two of his own sailing boats, both sixteen
feet, one as a boy in high school and another while in Law
School. In light airs, they would outsail the other boats on
the Potomac. Mr. Heath liked to recall that when all the big
ones were standing around waiting for wind, the “Gem” would

sail among them. Asked why he considered sailing the queen of all the sports, he once said, “I would have to go into poetry for that.” He might well have done so; for all his life he loved language and poetry. His philosophy in later life was a combina­tion of the engineer and the poet.

 

 Mr. Heath entered private law practice, and between 1908 and 1912 was chief patent counsel and technical aid to Christopher and Simon Lake in connection with submarines and early aircraft, and to Emilie Berliner, inventor of the telephone transmitter and of the flat disk method of making records for talking machines, and a pioneer in the aeronautical field. Emilie Berliner was interested at this early date in the helicopter principle, and with several sets of rotor blades designed and built for him by Mr. Heath, he succeeded in demonstrating, by tests in which the machine was chained to the ground to keep it from flying out of control, that enough lift could be attained to make the helicopter practical.

 In 1910, Mr. Heath formed his own propeller company in
Washington. It grew until, in 1912, he quit his law practice and
moved the company from Washington to Baltimore, where it was incorporated as “The American            Propeller & Manufacturing Company.”

 These were the days when it was thought that “anyone who had any proper sense didn’t fool with aeroplanes.” Indicative of this attitude was the reaction of Baltimore’s businessmen — lumber and hardware firms — who had been glad enough to extend credit for the new “propeller company.” But on finding out that the propellers would not be for ships but for air ships, they cut off all credit immediately. Fortunately, cash sales were brisk enough that such financing was never needed.

 Mr. Heath went on, between 1912 and 1917, to develop the first machine mass production of propellers, replacing the method whereby a woodworker stood at a bench and carved them out by hand. Four of his early machines produced 250 propellers per day.

 When War came, his production methods enabled him to meet

the emergency, and the Government, throughout the critical stages of the War, depended entirely upon the celebrated “Paragon” propellers produced in the plants of the American Propeller & Mfg. Co. An incident during the War illustrates Mr. Heath’s characteristic fashion of meeting emergencies in uncharacteristic ways. The Government ordered some propellers to be made to Government specs which he knew were unsound; the propellers would likely break up in the air. When Mr. Heath offered a very slight change that would make the propellers safe, the war department would not hear him — possibly because he had got crosswise with FDR, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, over the issue of cost-plus contracting, which Mr. Heath strongly opposed on the ground that it was irresponsible and open to featherbedding. When he persisted, he was told bluntly, “Mr. Heath, this is wartime; you make those propellers, or we’ll shoot you.” This was a grave situation: ought he risk the lives of airmen, or disobey orders in wartime? He made the propellers to specification, but when the shipment was on the loading dock to go out on the early morning train, he returned after hours with one helper, opened every crate and, with a rubber stamp he had made, stamped every propeller hub with the words:

 

MADE UNDER PROTEST

                     CONDEMNED BY MANUFACTURER.

 

The propellers never went overseas. The rubber stamp is still preserved by Mr. Heath’s family.

 On May 16, 1919, “Paragon” propellers powered the first crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by air, a flight conducted by Navy sea (“N-C”) planes from Trepassy, Newfoundland, to the Azores.

 After the War, Mr. Heath concentrated research upon and demonstrated the first practical engine-powered and controlled variable and reversible pitch propeller, doing for aircraft essentially what the gearshift did for the automobile and aiding materially in the development of aviation for general commercial uses. Until that time, aviation had been regarded principally as a military device and sportsman’s hobby. Although first, his design was not the one ultimately adopted in the industry.

In 1923, responding to a growing interest in horticulture

and ornamental landscaping, he formed Roadsend Gardens Nurseries, specializing in ornamental evergreens, at his country place and farm in Elkridge, Maryland, for which he had acquired land in 1918. In the summer of 1929, he sold his propeller company and all patents and technical facilities to Bendix Aviation, continuing for two years as a research engineer for Bendix in the United States and England.

 

 No longer was aviation in its infancy; it was well established, and Mr. Heath’s pioneering instincts led him
to new frontiers. In 1932, he retired to his farm and nursery, “Roadsend Gardens,” and devoted himself to a longstanding interest in the philosophy of science. Soon delegating most of his nursery business to others, he sought to discover what the successful sciences such as physics and biology — sciences that had given rise to dependable technologies — had in common that could form the basis of a natural science of society. Using basic engineering methods, he observed, questioned, read, and wrote until his material took on the dimensions of a book. In 1955, a grandson, Spencer Heath MacCallum, joined him and helped him bring his manuscript, which he referred to as “an engineer’s report, to final form under the title, Citadel, Market and Altar.

 

 At about this time, Mr. Heath formed the Science of Society Foundation, Inc, for the chief purpose of promoting a wider and deeper understanding of the voluntary institutions of mankind. In 1957, this organization published his book, designed and printed by Yale University Press, for which columnist John Chamberlain contributed a foreword. The book had a limited distribution, largely of gift copies sent to notable individuals whom he respected. This brought a strongly sympathetic response from some outstanding scholars and men in public life including Charles C. Gillispie, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History of Science, Emeritus, Princeton University; John J. Grebe, Director of Nuclear Research, Dow Chemical; William Ernest Hocking, Alford Professor Emeritus, Harvard University; Virgil Jordan, Chancellor, National Industrial Conference Board; Edwin G. Nourse, Past Chairman, Council of Economic Advisors to the President; Roscoe Pound, Dean Emeritus, Harvard Law School, and others.[1]

 

 In 1958, Mr. Heath visited with friends in Orange County,

California, where he found many people interested in his

pioneering experiences in aviation and formed a circle of friends who became “kindred spirits” in their understanding and apprecia­tion of his general philosophic ideas. Colleges such as Chapman College, Orange, California; Santa Ana College, Santa Ana; Pepperdine College in Los Angeles; and the Harvey Mudd College of Science and Engineering, in Claremont, held seminars and discussions with faculty and students. (During an extended visit at Harvey Mudd College, he was called “Octogenarian in Residence”. From these occasions a collection of extemporary talks and discussions with Mr. Heath have been preserved on tape. In many of these Mr. Heath approaches his ideas from their religious aspect, according to an interpretation that had been for some time developing in his mind (in 1953 he took time out from his other activities to take an advanced course in theology at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn.). Some of these tapes have been transcribed and edited for publication by his grandson who helped him with his book and is now in his Ph.D. program in anthropology at the University of Chicago.

 In Orange County and Southern California, Mr. Heath finally achieved what he had long dreamed of — a circle of people who could understand and further discover basic principles as he had discovered them in the social field, and project these as a basis on which to soundly build freedom in the world. His ideas are being carried forward vigorously in a new organization, The Free Enterprise Institute, founded independently in Los Angeles in 1961 by an astro-physicist, Dr. Joseph A. Galambos, and a research engineer, Alvin Lowi, Jr. Just as this work was gaining momentum, however, illness overtook Mr. Heath, then in his 86th year. He returned East in March of 1962 to be with his daughters in his native state of Virginia, and died in Leesburg on October 6, 1963.

 Perhaps the words with which he ended his 86th birthday dinner sum up his total philosophy:

“There is no end to life;

     There is only life, to life.”

 

Spencer Heath

January 3, 1962

Santa Ana, California

 

Affiliations

 

     Spencer Heath was of New York Quaker stock, attended the

St, James Episcopal Church on Lido Isle, Newport Beach, California, when he was in California. He was an early and active member of the Aero Club of America. In 1916 he became a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers and was appointed to the Engineering Standards Committee. He was a member of the Newcomen Society of England.